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suppose you love a certain book and you own the PRINTED book. like old fashion books, real deal, real paper.
Then you would like an electronic version, and come across a PDF of that book via some torrent or FTP server abroad. Do you hesitate to download the book, based on moral issues, or say what the heck, I already OWN the book, it's right here on my bookshelf, why not have a mobile copy on my iPad/Kindle/Nook?
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Oh god don't fall for the honeypot! :poke:
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If I own the print copy, I have no moral objection to having an electronic copy. At all.
In fact, I have a couple books I have done just that with.
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This reflects one of the snags in eBooks, I was just thinking of this the other day.
I've purchased a dozen or so books via iBooks, for my iPad, and realize, I can't loan or give them to friends like I can a traditional book. But I pay a price that's not that far from the cost of a traditional book. Which can be loaned or given without any barriers.
Imagine purchasing a traditional book that had some filter that made it inaccessible to anyone other than the individual who purchased it. Unthinkable.
I know Amazon, and perhaps some others, have attempted to address this. But with iBooks items, I'm not able (as far as I know) to easily transfer. My wife doesn't have an iPad, she has a Surface. Is there an iBooks App available for Surface users? If so, we could share an account, I suppose. Ideally, I would enjoy the same benefits regular book owners enjoy.
It's a headache.
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You own that copy of the book, not the work. Chances are, whoever put that PDF up had no right to do so. So no, I would not be inclined to download it. But that's easy for me to say, since I have no devices on which a PDF book would be useful to me.
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This is an interesting legal question - is the hard copy just a license? If so, seems to me a digital copy is fine so long as you don't sell it without giving the license at the same time (the book).
As for iBooks, I think that's perhaps the most restrictive DRM books options one can buy today.
Many kindle ebooks CAN be loaned.
But the resale of ebooks is going to be an interesting legal issue in the near future. Fr example, what happens to the rights to my ebooks when I pass away? Can I will them like other property?
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I apply that rule to music. If I have the Lp, a ripped cd is cool .
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Imagine buying a movie on dvd and not being able to lend it out...bla bla bla. The discussion goes on and on.
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I started a thread like this, on the old forum, about Napster & 45s I owned. It went on for several pages as I recall. This was not a poll, but the bottom line consensus was that, no, if I owned the 45 of a song it was not morally okay to download the mp3.
My big problem with eBooks is (a) lack of availability (though it's like CDs in their infancy; the publishers will eventually catch up, which brings me to... (b) lack of proper editing. That is, there's glaring errors in a lot of eBooks I buy -- things that look like bad OCR -- "a1l" for "all" and similar. Shit that a simple read-thru would fix.
It's like they have an intern, a page scanner, and a deadline, and that's all they give a frak about.
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sekker wrote:
This is an interesting legal question - is the hard copy just a license?
No.
Absolutely not.
It is a tangible, exchangeable, sellable property. A physical printed book is not intellectual property. It is subject to the first sale doctrine and short of a civil lawsuit for copying it, any author's attempt to control what you do with his/her printed work after purchasing -- whether you want to loan, resell it or piss on it -- has no basis in the law.
In general, an author has the right to keep you from duplicating his/her words from a book or making derivative works such as stage-plays where substantial passages are taken from it and where your copy/derivative has a substantial impact upon the original work's marketability and has little or no benefit to society. This is the nature of copyright -- a monopoly on the market for the work, not the aftermarket.
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